Peter the Great’s lost ship found?

Archaeologists from St Petersburg have discovered a ship in the Gulf of Finland that probably belonged to the fleet of Russian Emperor, Peter the Great. Meanwhile, the ship is lying right on the route of the Nord Stream pipeline, which is currently under

It is believed that, along with other Russian ships, it was heading to Finland in 1713 under the Tsar’s personal command. In his notes he referred to the ship as ‘lost’.

“The ship was probably built in 1710 and sank during a raid aimed at conquering Finland,” said Sergey Kobylyansky, Administrative Director of the “Undersea Heritage of Russia” archaeological project.

The members of the project want to raise the vessel and examine it. They plan to ask the energy giant Gazprom for help in lifting the ship.

The Nord Stream pipeline is to transport Russian gas to European customers, bypassing transit countries. It will run along the seabed of the Baltic Sea.

“The Undersea Heritage of Russia” project (earlier called “The Mystery of Sunken Ships”) which has already been functioning for seven years in the framework of the Baltic Sea Union, unites historians, divers and seamen. They have discovered more than 200 sunken vessels of historic importance during this time.

Earlier this year, in July, archaeologists discovered the wreck of a Russian battleship designed by Peter the Great in Amsterdam, which played a key role in a 1719 victory over Sweden in a war on the Baltic Sea.

According to The St. Petersburg Times, a team including professional archaeologists, divers, a film-producer and a cameraman, working for the same project, discovered the 54-gun “Portsmouth” battleship. It was lying at a depth of 12-metres in the waters off Kotlin Island near the town of Kronstadt. During the project’s mission, which lasted for three months, a total of 11 shipwrecks were found, including the remains of the “Oleg,” a cruiser built in St. Petersburg between 1901 and 1903 and sunk by an English torpedo on July 8, 1919, and those of an aircraft resembling the Li-2 model downed in 1944.